Finishing The $100 Wind Turbine

[Music] hi so this turbine it's approaching the end of its build actually now obviously i've rebuilt it from the original one because of all that i learned from it but the costs involved in building this particular version are really just minuscule i mean i paid for the magnets and i paid i think it was about 20 pounds for 50 of them something like that i paid for the bearings which were three or four pounds and the coils remember were donated thank you very much guys for all the donations actually and on each coil working with what we worked before we've got a tiny bridge rectifier these bridge rectifiers were a pound for 10 so i paid 10 pounds for each of those and there are 38 of them so 3 pounds 80. so if we add that up and put in a bit of leeway for things like welding rods and that sort of stuff we're probably talking about no more than 50 pounds to build this entire thing that's pretty awesome now the amount of energy that this can actually generate is fixed it's fixed by its size uh i'll check the size but i think it is 48 centimeters tall by uh what was it 58 centimeters in diameter so you can always calculate what the maximum output of that is going to be any particular wind speed if you want it is of course going to be governed by the bet's law so what is that uh 59.3 percent of the available wind power can be taken out at maximum that will give you an idea of that if this was 100 efficient what kind of energy something like this can generate now we can get more out of it if we put more coils on but we can't get more than the maximum that it's going to be able to generate now with these coils what i've done is i've arranged them in a little arc in four segments as you can see here i've connected them all up and connected in parallel but each one comes with its own bridge rectifier there are four segments that go on the bottom like that and then we put a screw in there to hold those together okay so there's the basics of it finished now i was going to take it out in the fresh air but it's absolutely chucking it down and i don't fancy getting that wet and cold so what i've done is i've put a blower on it and i've put a blower on it just so that you can see it spin really and listen to its spin that is really ultra quiet okay the only noise you can hear in fact is the blower noise now i connected those um output coils to a couple of capacitors they're um microwave oven capacitors because that's what i've got they were denoted along with all the other microwave oven parts that lots of this is made from and here you can see a diode on the positive that's a blocking diode that means is all of this energy is getting dumped into this capacitor this capacitor then can dump it into this battery here and when this is not running or it runs below then it can't go the other way so we're blocking it from returning and all we're doing is charging the battery now i'm measuring the battery voltage it's uh 12.046.045.046 and what we're going to do is leave that to run and watch that battery charge voltage go up now to my mind that's an accurate measure of what these things can do it's extremely rare for you to put a wind turbine directly to a load it's really much more common to put it to some kind of storage and then run reload from the storage so what we really want to know is how long does it take to charge up this battery and how long how much will this battery hold now obviously i want to do that over an entire day so what i want to do is discharge the battery set this up leave it running come back and find out how much charge is on that battery so that i can see how much that has actually generated and put into my store for me which i can then really use so to me that emulates more of a real world condition because it doesn't give you an instant answer which is a bit unfortunate but it does emulate the real world condition in which this thing is going to operate so the next test of this really is to set up on my roof and connect it discharge the battery and leave it until that battery is charged and we'll see what it actually does now i did go to the trouble of calculating what the possible output given when speed of this thing was then i adjusted it for the bets coefficient and i made a graph of it and here's the graph now from that graph you can obviously see the upscale as wind speed increases and when it gets to about 22 miles an hour or something which is quite a wind speed this thing is supposed to be able to generate at about 1.2 kilowatts i think now it's not going to do that okay because there are inefficiencies in here that will bring that down i don't know what it's going to bring it down to but we can assume that it will bring it down but theoretically it has the possibility of a kilowatt hour a kilowatt generator in a 22 mile 22 meter per second wind as i say putting it on the blower inside because it's raining and cold is hardly ideal so let's get it outside on the next test but that is the basic idea complete and i'm really enjoying that actually because it is really charging a battery what it's actually outputting we don't know okay but can it output something and hold and store that charge categorically yes it can hopefully we can answer that next question when we put it in a real world condition that is get it on the roof get that battery charging and see how long it takes to charge okay we're at um 1.204 so over that period of the video it's gone up a few hundredths of a volt anyway i thought i would um show you that i hope you enjoyed the video and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 116,525

Keywords: VAWT, HAWT, wind, turbine, off grid, power, robert, fwg, generator, generation, energy, offgrid, homesteading, murray-smith, design, alternative, disruptive, technology, green, renewable, dt, science, fair, project, home, made, built, how to, build, make, physics, education, stem, steam, applied, engineering

Id: GKHVENEsHzY

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021